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What is VITA 100? (Part 1)

Aug. 12, 2025

VITA 100 builds on the success of OpenVPX that is built on VITA standards. Log in and watch this video about VITA 100.

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If you work in the defense or avionics industry then you are probably familiar with VITA standards. These are open standards that make it possible to build rugged systems that have interchangeable components because of the standard interfaces. Many of the standard center around board and module interfaces that embody OpenVPX. OpenVPX allows 3U and 6U chassis to host compatible boards from different vendors.

The success of OpenVPX and related standards like Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA) has not gone unnoticed but, like most standards, they are based on capabilities at the time. Likewise, higher speed and more reliable technologies are becoming available and new standards are needed to take advantage of these capabilities, hence the VITA 100 effort.

In this video (above) I talked with Daniel Toohey, Toohey is a Fellow Chief Technologist within the Advanced Concepts Group at Mercury Systems, Michael Walmsley, Global Product Manager in the Aerospace, Defense and Marine business unit at TE Connectivity, and Mark Littlefield, Senior Manager of Embedded Computing Products and Services for Elma Electronics, about VITA 100.

One of the driving factors is the increase speed of Ethernet. VITA 46.30 defines support for 100 G Ethernet while VITA 100 targets 400 G Ethernet (Fig. 1).

VITA 100 is designed to:

Increase network speeds by a factor of 4
Double the number of interface pins
Double the amount of power per board
Provide interoperability with VPX while reducing the number of profiles

VITA 100 is actually the collection of new standards that extend existing VITA standards that define everything from board size and connectors to network speeds and feeds. Individual standards address each aspect of the system with details about connectors, power requirements, and management protocols. There is still plenty of room for innovation but the standards allow more collaborative work as well as making it easier to maintain and upgrade systems that may be in operation for more than twenty years, far in excess of consumer and even many industrial applications.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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